Plumbing

We touched on this briefly back in November, but we wanted to focus on drains and less on sewers this time around.

You will probably have to call for service for various aspects of your home or car during your lifetime. However, you can make these visits rarer by doing some preventative work on your own. Changing the oil in your car, even if you have someone else do it, will make your car last vastly much longer than if you fail to do so.

So it is with your humble household drains. A little care goes a long way in time, labor, and money.

The sewer

Image courtesy of www.deadlinedetroit.com

If your sewer line seems to clog every year or two, you might as well bite the proverbial bullet by getting a diagnosis on the line and paying to have it fixed. You’ll save money and a headache in the long game by clearing out the tree roots, fixing the cracked pipe, or whatever the cause of the clog may be.

Lint catcher

Every time you wash clothes bits and pieces of fabric come off and end up in the drain. These particles can add up to a clog. To prevent this a mesh trap purchased from a hardware store or even an old nylon stocking can keep the lint from accumulating in your drain.

Drain cleaner

Fight the marketing! Don’t pour acid cleaners down your drains. Instead, if you’re going for preventative maintenance, use a granular bacterial cleaner. It’s safe for all kinds of pipes and traps and you can use it in a septic system, too. You want to break up beginning clogs, not corrode your pipes.

Ban the FOG

Not that kind of fog! (Image courtesy of Anthony Quintano, Creative Commons)

Perhaps your mother told you never to pour fat, oil, or grease (FOG) down the kitchen sink drain–or perhaps not. To those mothers who did, they were right. Sure, it may be hot and liquid going down the drain now, but soon it will cool and congeal, creating a nifty block somewhere in your line waiting to grab more debris. Someday that little blob could grow to stop everything you send at it.

Cement? Really?

Image courtesy Creative Commons

If you’ve got a DIYer in the house, he or she may have been tempted to dump the leftover cement, grout, joint compounds, or whatever other sealing substance in your sink. Get them to stop–NOW! Just like FOG, that stuff can accumulate, grabbing other particles, eventually prompting a call to a plumber. Save yourself some cash, don’t dump it in the sink.

Ewww! Hair!

Sometimes you just have to clean out the shower drain. You can make it slightly less icky by installing a screen for the tub/shower drain. It’s your call.

Not everything goes in the garbage disposal

Image courtesy szczel and Creative Commons

Instead of squandering all the goodness that is food waste, you could easily compost and make some free fertilizer for your garden or give it away to a gardener. The point is garbage disposals are meant to grind up smaller pieces of food waste. Dumping your leftovers down the drain is only asking for a clog sooner or later.

Do the right thing (if possible) and compost your plant waste.

This one is embarrassing…and the plumber knows when you’re lying.

We’ve seen it in public restrooms…people using the toilet as a wastebasket. Sure, bodily waste belongs IN the toilet, and the associated paper, but nothing else. Plumbers will tell you that some people practice that behavior with their home toilet. If you want to avoid paying a plumber for something easily avoided, don’t put anything that should go in a wastebasket into your toilet.

There will be times that you simply have to call a plumber to help you with a problem that is beyond your skill or time available. But you can skip calling one as often if you follow these few tips to keep your plumbing systems relatively clog free.

Sewers, believe it or not, have been around for over 4,000 years–though not every people embraced them or even knew about them. Archaeological records show that two cities in the Indus Valley in India had working sewers (and outdoor flush toilets) around the year 2600 B.C.

We’ve made a few improvements in that time.

However, contemporary sewers will break down and have problems eventually, usually back-ups inside a home or business or visible outside above the sewer line.

How Do I Know I Have a Sewer Problem?

This might seem a funny question, but you may not know the symptoms. If you have any of the following you may have a malfunctioning sewer:

slow drain

gurgling drain

toilet not flushing

garbage disposal won’t drain

the bathroom lavatory (sink) takes an hour to drain

water comes up through a basement floor drain after a flushed toilet or drained laundry tub

This is not, unfortunately, a DIY fix.

What Caused This Back-Up?

There are a number of culprits for sewer back-ups including tree roots, breakage of clay pipe, corrosion of cast-iron pipe, FOG (fat, oil, grease) clogs, and torrential rains or flooding. It is now a FEMA requirement that all new construction includes a backwater valve to help prevent flooding inside a building.

How Do We Stop the Bleeding?

As mentioned, this is generally not a DIY fix. The easy fix is to snake the line and clear the clog, but sometimes that can be 150′ of cable down a drain (not usually the length of a home snake). It becomes harder when the sewer line has to be dug up and replaced.

As an aside, you’ll want to make sure the contractor you hire is competent. Improper installation, using the wrong glue, rushing, and general incompetence can lead to another sewer problem a few short years down the line.

You’re not going to get at your sewer line with a hand shovel

You can expect a sewer repair to cost anywhere from $200 all the way into the tens of thousands of dollars depending on the problem and complexity. The repairs can be done in a day or longer. If your municipality has to get involved that may mean securing bonds, special approval and permits, which, of course, only makes the process longer.

The Care (and Feeding?) of Your Sewer

Many sewer problems can’t be prevented by home and business owners, but you can do a few things to extend the life of your sewer line.

Don’t use solvents like Draino or acids–they can cause deterioration of the lines and they can cause garbage disposals to prematurely fail.

For Heaven’s sake, don’t pour oils, fats, or grease down your drains. They will harden and collect somewhere in your plumbing.

If you know that your pipes are older, don’t use the garbage disposal as a trash can.

Know that cutting back tree roots by your sewer is usually only a fix for about a year. Trees gotta grow!

If you go through life without ever having to call a plumber, consider yourself fortunate. But for the rest of us, how do you know the plumber you hired is on the level?

Let’s get this out of the way: most plumbers are reputable, competent, and possibly even a joy to work with. But then there are those other plumbers…

We’ve all probably heard of someone having a bad experience with a plumber. Just like with any profession you’ll find con-artists, incompetents, and plain old apples that have fallen off the shelf and rolled around on the grocery store floor.

The trouble is what if you hired him or her? And how can you know?

There are a few things to look for in a plumber before hiring him or her or at least halting the work of one you may have already given the go-ahead to.

Know your plumbing company. Does the company or individual have a solid reputation with customers? If you don’t have a recommendation from a friend or relative, it’s beyond easy to find online reviews of local plumbers. One or two negative reviews among many shouldn’t concern you, but if they have none or more than a just a few, you might want to skip contacting them.

If the job calls for a permit, don’t skip it. Yes, permits incur extra costs, but they protect you and the plumber. If your plumber is telling you he can get by without one, fire him immediately. You can be setting yourself up for extra cost and legal action against you from your town.

Photo courtesy Dave Bleasdale, Creative Commons

Not everything has to be replaced. Repairs are possible on your plumbing fixtures. If your faucet is obsolete or the toilet is approaching its golden anniversary, then replacement is probably a good option. Repairs do tend to be cheaper, however, and you’re sending less stuff to the landfill.

Don’t be afraid to push back against a recommendation for replacement.

Second opinions are acceptable in medicine, why not plumbing? If we hear bad news from a doctor, the smart thing is to get it verified from another source to eliminate mistakes. If your home or business is calling for something beyond a standard repair—patching a leak in your sewer line for instance—get a second or third opinion on the problem.

You might not only save money on a lower estimate, but you may find out the problem was not a problem at all.

Photo courtesy Alex Proimos, Creative Commons

Clothes make the plumber…sort of. We are told judging others is wrong, especially on their appearance and there is wisdom in that. However, if the plumber you called shows up in a soiled shirt, looks like he hasn’t combed his hair in a month, and reeks of controlled substances, you may want to say the leak has been plugged by angels and you’re no longer in need of his help.

Know that crooks do wear plumber’s uniforms. Occasionally, you’ll hear stories about someone who, because of sewer problems, hired a company to put a camera in the sewer line and were given a grim diagnosis. When in reality the guys played pre-recorded looped footage of tree roots in the owner’s sewer and claimed it would costs thousands to fix when the scope of the problem was smaller and cheaper.

Review #1 and #4 before accepting a high estimate.

Crooked plumbers aren’t always easy to spot.

Cutting corners isn’t always cheaper (in the long run). Going with the cheapest solution to your plumbing problems isn’t always the best. If you lack the time or the skill set to solve your issue, why wouldn’t you try to find the best fit for your problem? Good plumbers deserve fair wages. Finding the lowest-priced plumber, doesn’t mean you won’t be calling him or her again in two or three months for the same problem.

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